Tales From the Sustainable Underground. Stephen Hren

is satisfying. The people I met in this dynamic city, and all across the country, were mostly violating laws that started out as reasonable but ended up being used as a source of privilege and corruption. The motivations of the amazingly diverse group of folks I met who were challenging laws across the land were remarkably consistent, a mix of a longing for more personal independence and a desire to bring their lives and communities back into the cycle of life. It was a great inspiration to see how consistently these two goals were achieved by the same actions.

      Part of what makes Detroit so interesting as a jumping off point is how unsustainably it grew after 1900, especially as the advent of the automobile industry transformed the town into the Motor City. Detroit was one of the first cities to embrace the automobile on a large scale, with Henry Ford’s five-dollars-a-day wage given much of the credit for developing a manufacturing middle class capable of affording this luxury. All technology is a double-edged sword, and whatever conveniences it provides come at the cost of more dependencies. The car culture that swallowed Detroit’s city planning is an excellent example of this. The rampant suburbanization that didn’t severely affect many cities until after World War II was already evident in 1920’s Detroit. Many main thoroughfares are four or five lanes wide, even in the older parts of town. Trying to cross these mammoth and decaying boulevards on foot feels foolhardy, and the fear of the light changing before you’re anywhere near the other side is constant. Getting around without a car, unlike in neighboring midwestern cities like Milwaukee and Chicago, is unimaginable to a newcomer like myself.

      Detroit continued its road-building binge after World War II, steamrolling older neighborhoods to make way for a bevy of interstates to ferry fearful whites out to the burbs from downtown. It worked. And then these urban refugees decided they would simply build their businesses out where they lived, especially after the Twelfth Street riot raged for five days in the summer of 1967 leaving 43 dead. Next, the oil spikes of the 1970s came and put massive dents in the auto industry. By the turn of the millennium, large swaths of the city had been abandoned and burned to the ground. Finding a grocery store became close to impossible for many urban residents.

      All of this puts Detroit at the forefront of dealing with issues that are likely to plague the rest of the nation, and potentially the world, this century. Dwindling fossil fuel supplies will likely make much of the suburbs in their current form uninhabitable. Importing food long distances is likewise suspect. Archaic and poorly applied laws, relics of the days of cheap fossil fuels and ignorance of global climate disruption, hinder and exasperate attempts to retrofit existing infrastructure for sustainability. Every city faces the prospect of lower populations, so the paradigm of paying for existing infrastructure with revenue from new growth is suspect everywhere. Most fundamentally, relying on a culture that attempts to derive its satisfaction from ever-increasing–quantities of material goods rather than a deep connection with nature, community and personal spirituality is no longer possible for most folks in Detroit. The material economy has been decreasing for decades.

      While responding with fear and dread to these disturbing phenomena is understandable, many Detroiters have also come to understand that relying on a fix from the powers that be is foolhardy at best. Mistrust of the law’s benevolence has combined with an ingrained DIY ethic to get folks out from in front of their TVs and computers and trying to do stuff to improve their lives and communities, regardless of the law or the outdated mores of their neighbors.

      To understand whether changing any particular law will allow for a more profound flourishing of sustainability, it helps to start off with at least a cursory examination of the foundations of our culture and to test the bedrock upon which it rests. I found a great forum for exploring these deeper questions when I showed up at Dabl’s and Perette’s African Bead Museum, on the corner of Grand River and Grand Boulevard near downtown Detroit. I parked on a block that dead-ended into a freeway, with a staid church on my right and the vibrantly patterned African Bead Museum on my left. The brick walls of the two-story building were painted in a frenzied red, yellow and black, with shards of broken mirrors interwoven into bold geometric designs. The sidewalk was filled with a multitude of unrecognizable scripts (at least to me), all underneath an orderly procession of juvenile maple trees. Beyond this main building lay an intriguing arrangement of artwork in an open field, a mix of painted cars, stones sitting in chairs, and piled up paint cans in some kind of fort. All of this artwork was arranged in front of what had initially caught my eye, a two-story multi-family boarded-up house decorated with vivid geometric patterns and the ubiquitous shards of mirror.

      The entrance to Dabl’s and Perette’s African Bead Museum in Detroit. The chevron beads painted on the wall represent a nonverbal form of cultural transmission sorely lacking today.

      Once inside, I found Dabl presiding over a glass countertop with rows upon rows of hanging beads surrounding him on all walls. He is a large stout man, especially compared with my own skinny self, with close-cropped hair and an introspective air that gives a thoughtful and measured cadence to his deep voice. Over the next few hours I would receive not just a detailed history of the African bead, but also a multitude of ideas about how art, language and writing can either keep cultures enslaved on the path to destruction, or be used as tools of wisdom to help us integrate ourselves with the natural world. Finally, I would learn the motives behind his unsanctioned decorating of the two-story boarded-up home, and how this was an amazing example of bringing “art” (Dabl despised this word) back to its original purpose of preserving history and conveying cultural stories in an unwritten format.

      Beads have a long history in all pre-European African societies, especially with the semi-nomadic pastoralists of sub-Saharan Africa, and their origin was considered mystical. Originally made of wood, bone, shells and stone, their diversity of color and meaning flourished after the introduction of glass beads from the Middle East in 200– 300 ad, and became crucially important for pastoralists. These glass beads were often further enhanced by local tribes, and some parts of Africa began manufacturing their own glass beads by the Middle Ages. Beads were used to convey position and marital status and represent ancestors, but especially, along with patterned textiles, to tell the stories of the tribe. More sedentary clans in the wetter parts of Africa also used beads, but supplemented them with artifacts such as carvings, masks and other totems. All these things assisted in keeping alive the oral traditions and stories that shaped and directed these cultures. While Dabl was an expert in the bead and its role in Africa specifically, I found myself generalizing much of what he said to indigenous cultures around the world. Ultimately, he was asking me a profound question: Is art or even literature sustainable? Or does it result in patterns of thought that ultimately separate us and our culture from the natural world? According to Dabl, as an African-American he is part of a population that has been marginalized and whose history and culture have been co-opted. There was not much to disagree with there. But he then argued that forsaking an oral tradition based on handcrafted artifacts in favor of art and the written word, and later the televised image, took a form of story transmission out of the natural world and the community, and isolated it in the mind and the individual. Likewise, the idea of the lone artist working in isolation to create works of “genius” separated from tradition and any cultural story forced the audience for this art to think in terms of these objects being inaccessible and without historical meaning. Such objects are not to be touched and their interpretation is ambiguous and often incomprehensible. They are not a part of day-to-day life and their utility is dispensable.

      More traditional methods of cultural transfer like beads and other physical creations, the kind of stuff we would describe as being created by artisans, have been denigrated and eradicated to great effect and, according to Dabl, replaced with stories and religions that are anthropocentric and no longer in the control of the people that need them. Although I’ve heard similar arguments before, it was great to hear it explained from a minority perspective and put in terms of our relationship with creative expression.

      One book that had a profound effect upon me in this regard is Chellis Glendinning’s My Name is Chellis and I’m in Recovery From Western Civilization. Chellis does a wonderful job laying out how our move from a nomadic lifestyle to agricultural domestication ten thousand years ago started a spiral of disconnection